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We like to thank those of you having supported our cause through WildlifeDirect – Michelle P. in particular! We hope for your continued support through our online donation option via ElephantVoices.org. – All contributions towards elephants and our work are much appreciated!

We are happy to report that elephants did well at CITES in Doha! We firmly believe that, if they had been accepted, the proposals from Tanzania and Zambia would have further stimulated the ivory trade and the killing of elephants. We feel extremely pleased that months of work and collaboration with scientists and other stakeholders around the world led to this good result for elephants.

Twenty years after the international trade in ivory was banned, many of you have read that there is a new boom in the killing of elephants for their tusks. This development is a critical threat to the future of elephants, and we and many others work hard to try to convince CITES that they should reject proposals from Tanzania and Zambia that we believe will further stimulate the trade in ivory and poaching.

From the ivory burning in Nairobi National Park in July 1991 - 6.8 tonnes were set on fire to give the signal to the world that protecting elephants are more important than short term monetary gain. Copyright: ElephantVoices

To show the wonders of elephants and the brutality and devastation caused by the ivory trade we have made the little music video linked from YouTube below, composed with ElephantVoices’ images and footage. Please cross-post, embed and share with as many people as you can – help spreading the word! We thank Amboseli Trust for Elephants for one image. Music by Dubious Ranger. Lyrics by Coco Hall.

You can read lots more about the ivory trade here, and find selected media coverage here.

We send a warm thank you to those supporting us during 2009 – your interest and generous contributions makes a big difference and is highly appreciated! We dedicated your donations towards our work in Kenya, especially Petter’s field trip early in the year and Joyce’s in November.

We will at the same time apologize for not being as active on WildlifeDirect as we planned to. As a small organization we’re having a hard time dealing with all the elephant-issues we’re constantly confronted with – and (unfortunately) there are only 24 hours a day:-) We are happy to see that so many other bloggers on WD are active – and can only hope that some of you WD friends also visit us on ElephantVoices or ElephantVoices on Facebook.

People often ask us what THEY can do for elephants. There is actually a lot you CAN do – whether its helping to stop the killing of elephants for ivory, strengthening conservation efforts, being an eco-tourist (like Barack Obama-:)) or improving the lives of elephants in captivity. We have listed some ideas here. One special challenge is to educate those who do not understand what a life of confinement means, and especially about how much elephants in circuses suffer. WE NEED YOUR INVOLVEMENT!

We’re asking an important favour of you: Get your friends to join ElephantVoices on Facebook, and not only those you believe support elephants already. We would like to reach as many people as possible about elephant interests – which is why we’re spending time here on WildlifeDirect, on Facebook and on ElephantVoices.org. Each day we work with cases and issues trying to convince legislators, judges and other decision-makers that elephants deserve proper treatment – and public opinion is extremely important!

More and more people are on social networks. ElephantVoices is following the trend, with the obvious goal of improving our educational interface towards a global audience. With the current disastrous boom in the trade in ivory and poaching anybody working for the future and interest of elephants must optimize all efforts trying to reduce supply of and demand for ivory. A big job has to be done between now and the CITES conference (CoP15) starting in the middle of March.

ElephantVoices’ facebook “window” will be were we will post daily updates, viewpoints and comments, while hoping for many from you as well. Join us! We will at the same time continue to improve and expand ElephantVoices.org when it comes to comprehensive information about elephant communication and elephants interests, our multimedia databases, and access to other relevant resources. We will also give news updates through the site, and here on WildlifeDirect, when appropriate.

ElephantVoices 4U is launched to provide a network for youth who want to discuss and work together to secure a kinder future for elephants. We are very grateful for anyone recruiting young people to join!

ElephantVoices is also on Twitter, for people that want to follow our work and updates through this communication channel.

Some of you may enjoy watching a “video” put together by Petter from ElephantVoices’ visit to PAWS in San Andreas, California, in late October 2009. The soundtrack consist of elephant sounds from our collection, in a composition mixed by Gerry Bassermann.

We hope to see some of you during our lecture and fundraising tour in California from 17 to 29 October. We’re having events in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and in San Francisco. Oakland Zoo is hosting a reception and lecture on 28 October.

You will find all relevant information about the tour, with links to invitations/flyers, here.

We are grateful if you are willing to spread the word about The Elephant Charter. The intention with the online Charter is to provide a set of guiding Principles, based on elephant biology, to form a touchstone for anyone needing to address elephant interests.

Buttressed by its Appendix, The Elephant Charter represents a consensus of the nature of elephants. It is intended to promote scientifically sound and ethical management and care of all elephants, providing guidance to law and policy makers, enforcement agencies and the courts, organizations, institutions and international bodies, as well as to managers of wild and captive elephants.

The Elephant Charter is independent of any particular group or institution. Rather, its force comes from the expertise and stature of the elephant biologists who are its signatories. Its authors, Joyce Poole, Cynthia Moss, Raman Sukumar, Andrea Turkalo and Katy Payne are eminent elephant field biologists representing the longest studied populations of African savannah, Asian and African forest elephants: the elephants of Amboseli, Mudumalai and Dzanga Bai. With four decades of groundbreaking research on wild elephants, together with the research of many colleagues, they are collectively in a position to speak with confidence about the interests of elephants wherever they may be.

On the site elephant biologists are invited to join as Signatories, and to take ownership of the sentiments reflected in The Elephant Charter and to uphold its Principles. So far close to 50 elephant biologists have signed on.

You will furthermore find an invitation to members of the public, who wish to make their voices heard, to add their names as Supporting Signatories.

You may read what we just posted on ElephantVoices, and see the video from the rescue either there or below. Sometimes a bad situation ends up ok – even though I’m sure Kibo is still missing his family!

In todays newsletter, sent out to ElephantVoices friends and contacts around the world, we gave an introduction to the second generation ElephantVoices.org as well as touching on some of the issues that have occupied us over the last few months. Supported by programmers at Verviant.com in Nairobi, we have built a new cyber home. Our main purpose has been to develop an efficient, flexible and creative platform for the online sharing of information about elephants – their behavior, communication and interests.

We apologise for not being able to launch the news section and the Video Database at this stage. And you may find that some things don’t function as they should – please let us know! Our overall goal is to continue to expand and improve the site in the years to come.

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